How media companies can reclaim recruitment services market

Say the word “recruitment” and most newspaper executives groan. Over the last seven or eight years, it has shrunk to just a fraction of its former size, and it’s still slipping.

At Morris Publishing Group, we’ve been looking hard at this vertical for several months. We’ve been trying to figure out two things:

How can we do better at what’s left of our existing business.

How can we create new wins in this space?

We’re beginning to see the path ahead, so it’s a good time to share some of what we’ve learned.

What’s happened to recruitment is a classic case of disruptive innovation. We ruled the space in the pre-digital era. Then new digital technologies enabled a new set of players to come in underneath our expensive print solutions. They attracted big audiences and took away huge amounts of our business.

Our industry went to digital, too, but we slowed only the revenue declines. And, of course, we had a whopping recession to accelerate the trends.

In the last several months, our team at Morris has talked with numerous vendors and interviewed several experts in the business, trying to form a strategic view of what’s happening and what to do about it. And just recently I attended a recruitment-industry conference to see what recruiters are doing today and where they are struggling.

Part of the picture has become very clear: The recruiting business has moved well beyond the solutions most newspaper companies offer. Our solutions — mainly print job ads and job-board postings — are now just a small corner of the media part of recruiting. And the total media share is now only about 5% of recruitment spending.

To produce better results, our industry will have to start meeting additional needs for job seekers, recruiters, and agencies. If we don’t, we’ll just keep riding the old business down.

Newspaper companies are still providing Gen 1. Many of us also provide Gen 2, through partnerships with big job boards. Most of us haven’t graduated to Gens 3, 4 and 5, where most recruiters are now trying to find effective solutions.

The experts gave us some important input.

From Peter Weddle, a recruitment industry veteran who works mainly with job boards:

Recruitment is rebounding. “Hiring wars” might be coming soon for many types of positions.

Employers want a menu of products so they can tailor multi-faceted searches to specific jobs. They’ll pay good money to get what they need.

We need to navigate upstream, acquiring the ability to provide customised distribution of postings into the boards best suited for them.

We need to build a new segment of our business around two key strategies:

Help employers and agencies reach more passive candidates — in other words, expand our audience-creation skills intelligently into the recruitment market.

Help employers brand themselves in the market as great places to work, using solutions ranging from print display advertising to on-location video to social media activity. And that should include Facebook, which few use effectively.

Recruiters need help in a number of ways. Like most of us, they are constantly trying to achieve better results at lower costs. Our explorations suggest that if we’re willing to take the right steps to go beyond our legacy products and skill sets, we can regain our relevance to the employers in our markets.

As we go forward, I’ll share more information about what we’re doing. Meanwhile, I welcome you to share what you’re doing in the comments section below.

About Steve Gray

Steve Gray is director of strategy and innovation at Morris Communications, based in Augusta, Georgia, USA. He previously led the American Press Institute (API) Newspaper Next programme. This post is part of the Disruptive Innovation blog at INMA.org.